THE SEVEN BASIC PLOTS: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker (Continuum, £25)

IF your household is anything like ours, there are terrific ongoing arguments about what's worth watching on TV and what's rubbish. I'm talking about movies, soaps and drama series. My wife and I disagree often, but in some front rooms I'm told there's blood on the carpet between the supporters of EastEnders and the fans of Coronation Street. Personally, I can take as many repeats of Morse and Frost as you care to serve up but I can't abide two minutes of that wet Rosemary & Thyme or the leaden Midsomer Murders. This marvellous big book goes a long way towards explaining why we like some stories while others turn us off.

The brilliant claim of the book - that there are in fact only a few basic plots - is not new: it goes back to Goethe, the great German poet of the 18th century, who said there were only 16 original storylines and everything else is variations on a theme. We never tire of hearing the story of the voyage and return for example, from Jason and the Argonauts in ancient Greece to the Star Trek movies which are still among the most popular titles on video and DVD. It's the same with tales of the underdog - the pathetic weakling who turns out in the end to win the war, the castle, the bride, the money, the lot. And what does the fact that most civilisations have produced versions of the tale of the dying and rising god tell us about the nature of spiritual belief?

It's astonishing that, just as you can have the same tune played in a different key, you can get the same story as either epic or comedy, tragedy or farce: there's King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table - a passionate romantic tale of high seriousness - and then there's Monty Python and the Holy Grail - what you might call a scurrilous low comedy. The amazing fact is that both deep mythology and skittish farce contain elements of truth and wisdom.

As civilisations and cultures progress and develop - some might say decline and decay - we continue to tell the same stories. Except not quite. The basic characters in the tale remain but the storyline changes even into its opposite. For example, there are countless sea stories in which the fisherman-hero hunts the great fish; but in Moby Dick it is Captain Ahab the hunter who is psychologically hunted down by the whale. Villains can become heroes as in the bandits Bonnie and Clyde. This happens so often that we have even coined a word for it - "antihero". And the movies in which we are suspiciously rather glad to see the "baddies" win is the genre film noir. To rejoice in the triumph of wickedness - what does that teach us about human nature!

When I was a boy my mother used to tell me off for "always having your head in a book" when she thought I ought to be doing something useful like filling the coal scuttle or drying the pots. But you're never wasting your time when you're reading a novel, watching a play, listening to the opera - even if it's a soap-opera. For the reason is that the stories we tell are about ourselves. And they tell us the truth. Our fiction provides us with a way of confronting those thoughts and actions that we would run a mile to escape in real life.

Now I've said it! What is "real life" anyhow, and what is "only pretend"? Do we always know the difference? Even Shakespeare didn't. He said: "We are such things as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded with a sleep". I warn you: if you once open this book, you'll find it hard to shut.

Peter Mullen

Published: ??/??/2004